Vast amounts of information are available on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and on smaller networks. Users of desktop, laptop, and notebook computers have long enjoyed rich content, like images, audio, video, animation, and other multimedia content from such networks. As the number of features available in mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, smartphones, personal digital assistants, personal information managers, etc.) has increased, user expectations for those devices have also increased. Users now expect that much of the rich content will also be available from their mobile devices. They expect to have access on the road, in coffee shops, at home, and in the office through mobile devices, to information previously available only from a personal computer that was physically connected to an appropriately provisioned network. They want news, stock quotes, maps and directions, and weather reports from their cell phones; email from their personal digital assistants (PDAs); up-to-date documents from their smartphones; and timely, accurate search results from all their mobile devices.
Because input capabilities may be more limited in a mobile device (e.g., a smartphone) than in a fixed computing device (e.g., a desktop computer), more effort may be required of a user to enter a search query (or other information) from the mobile device than would be required of the user in entering the same search query from the fixed computing device. In addition, because displays in various mobile devices are often smaller than displays in fixed computing devices, it may not be possible to display as much information at any given time in a mobile device. Finally, data connections between a mobile device and various networked resources (e.g., the Internet) may be slower than corresponding data connections between a fixed computing device and the same networked resources.